The copyright cartel's plot to indoctrinate California kindergartens | Dan Gillmor

Hands up who knows about 'fair use'. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

In kindergarten, we teach children to share. By second grade – if people who bring you songs and pixie dust have their way – we'll amend that in a major way.

Hollywood and the recording industry (aka the Copyright Cartel) are leading the charge to create grade school lessons that – at least, in their draft form, as published by Wired – have a no-compromise message: if someone else created it, you need permission to use it.

Sounds wonderful, until you think about how creativity actually works. And never mind that the law, already tipped in favor of copyright holders, doesn't hold such an absolutist position.

It's no surprise to learn that America's biggest internet service providers – let's call them the Telecom Cartel, since that's what they've become – are part of this propaganda scheme. It's sad to learn, however, that the California School Library Association has climbed aboard; the organization helped produce the lessons that, thankfully, are still only in draft form. But they are likely to reach California classrooms later this school year and, presumably, other parts of the nation later on.

Wired obtained some of the draft lesson plans. They're amazing (and not in a complimentary way). The lesson aimed at second graders (pdf), for example, winds up this way:

We are all creators at some level. We hope others will respect our work and follow what we decide to allow with our photos, art, movies, etc. And we 'play fair' with their work too. We are careful to acknowledge the work of authors and creators and respect their ownership. We recognize that it's hard work to produce something, and we want to get paid for our work.

We're definitely all becoming creators, and we do want others to respect our work. But in the real world, and under the law, we can't make all the decisions about what uses we allow of that work. There's a concept called "fair use" – deliberately ignored in the lesson, on the absurd basis that kids can't understand it – that explicitly allows others to make use of our work in ways we don't like, or anticipate. Without fair use, creative works would be next to impossible, because we all build on the work of those who came before us.

Needless to say, this lesson and others made public – including grades one (pdf), five (pdf), and six (pdf) – have sparked a bit of an uproar outside the cartel's orbit. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Mitch Stoltz told Wired:

[The material] suggests, falsely, that ideas are property and that building on others' ideas always requires permission. The overriding message of this curriculum is that students' time should be consumed not in creating but in worrying about their impact on corporate profits.

What should schools actually be teaching? Happily, there are alternatives honoring copyright, which is important, but that also honor tradition, law and the greater culture.

Creative Commons' Jane Park has compiled an excellent listing of resources that educators can use to teach about copyright. I'm especially partial to the EFF's Teaching Copyright, which I've recommended to students of all ages, including some college students.

The California School Library Association should never have let itself become a handmaiden to commercial Hollywood. Perhaps, its leaders will realize that they are undermining the crucial role libraries have played in our society when they assist the copyright absolutists' agenda – because if libraries were invented today, the cartel would declare them to be both illegal and immoral.

I take some solace in a quote of the association's vice president, Glenn Warren, in the Wired story. Confronted with the inaccuracy and imbalance of the lessons, he acknowledged:

We've got some editing to do.

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'Kings of Cool' is a pulpy California tale

It's a mean, sun-dappled and pithy world that Don Winslow's outlaw characters inhabit in Kings of Cool.

Loyalties are constantly shifting. Drugs are ubiquitous, words are minimal and life is cheap. There is only one constant in Winslow's universe: the affection between the young trio at the novel's center.

Here we get the weed-whacked origin stories of close friends Ben, Chon and O, who were introduced in Winslow's 2010 best seller Savages (recently made into a movie directed by Oliver Stone and starring Blake Lively and Taylor Kitsch).

Navy SEAL Chon has a frighteningly easy way with violence. Ben studied botany in college and has a do-gooder's inclinations, but a casual callousness. Ben and Chon run a lucrative marijuana business with some ancillary help from O (for Ophelia), the twentysomething blonde they place above their own safety. And their safety is continually compromised by drug cartels, competing dope dealers, crooked law officers and even close family.

But O, Chon and Ben's bond is inviolable. Their development arrested, thanks to rotten parenting, the three cling to each other.

Set in 2005, this prequel goes back to when Ben and Chon launched their hydroponic grass enterprise. Shortly thereafter, they are asked (read ordered summarily) by a murky group called The Association to make monthly payments to a network dealing imported drugs. Afghanistan War vet Chon fights back and the trio's battles begin, ranging from Orange County to Mexico, via flashbacks to the pot peddlers of the mid-'60s and on to coked-out casualties of the following decades. We get the goods on the parents of Ben, Chon and O, subplots that are particularly chilling and often more compelling than the main story linking their children.

Winslow's brash shorthand style can be grating, but it suits the drug-hazed tale, set in California's moneyed Laguna Beach. He takes a simple declarative sentence and breaks it down to a kind of surf rap.

"Together Ben and Chon make up a collective pacifist. Ben is the paci Chon is the fist."

Winslow coins terms (some clever, some forced) and weaves in song lyrics. Action is presented in snippets and chapter-ettes (the first chapter is merely two words). Winslow's weakness is trying so hard to be royally cool. His self-consciously terse dialogue can seem more like the text of a tween than an adult novelist.

"O was made for sunshine. California gurl."

But as a former private investigator, Winslow knows his crime scene. His influences range from Tom Wolfe, Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy to the "surf noir" of Kem Nunn.

Occasionally he interjects a script format to further illuminate his amped-up prose. Not surprisingly, Kings of Cool reads more like a screenplay than a novel.

While Winslow's fractured narrative initially comes off a bit jarring, it ties up intriguingly. By the pulpy tale's dramatic conclusion involving a tense shootout with a surprise drug lord, it's tough not to be hooked.

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